Private security and ‘the Israelites of Latin America’

An Israeli defence consultancy is assisting with dirty work in Colombia previously monopolised by the United States.

Last Modified: 06 Jan 2012 17:44

Global CST, a defence industry firm, got close to Colombian President Santos over a period of years [EPA]

Much fuss has been made in recent years in neoconservative circles in the US and among Israeli foreign ministry officials, regarding the danger to global security posed by an alleged Islamist infiltration of Latin America.

A pet factoid wielded by self-appointed experts on the matter is that it is currently possible to travel by air from Caracas to Tehran with only one stop in Damascus. Lest policymakers and the general public fail to respond with adequate alarm to such news, the severity of the threat is underscored via invented links between Muslims in Latin America and every potentially unfavourable regional trend, resulting in a spectre of Islamo-narco-socialist crime cartels menacing the southern border of the US.

In a WikiLeaks cable from the US embassy in Bogota dated December 1, 2009, a rather unexpected entity joined the usual lineup of Latin America-based threats. The cable discusses the manoeuvres in Colombia of the Israeli firm Global Comprehensive Security Transformation (Global CST), founded by Major General (Res) Israel Ziv – former head of the Operations Directorate of the Israeli military – and contracted to aid in the fight against both criminal organisations and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as well as to evaluate potential perils emanating from Ecuador and Venezuela:

“Over a three year period, Ziv worked his way into the confidence of former [Colombian] Defense Minister [Juan Manuel] Santos by promising a cheaper version of USG [US government] assistance without our strings attached. We and the GOC [government of Colombia] learned that Global CST had no Latin American experience and that its proposals seem designed more to support Israeli equipment and services sales than to meet in-country needs”.

It is not clear why the US government should express surprise at the apparent failure to address “in-country needs” when its own Latin American experience includes the multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia, inaugurated more than a decade ago ostensibly as a means of curbing drug production and trafficking. In 2009, I spoke with farmers in the southern department of Putumayo who outlined in-country effects of the plan, such as repeated airborne fumigation of their subsistence crops, livestock, water supplies and children.

A substantial portion of Plan Colombia funds went to US-based private security contractors. Today, 97 per cent of cocaine that reaches the US reportedly hails from said country.

As for the strings that are allegedly attached to official US assistance, Amnesty International has objected to the fact that “the State Department continues to certify military aid to Colombia, even after reviewing the country’s human rights record” – which happens to hold the distinction of being the worst in the hemisphere.

Global CST’s experience

Ziv’s contention regarding the international relevance of his background in the Israeli military – “We felt that our experience could contribute tremendously to the world security and the world peace [sic]” – is, meanwhile, challenged by the following passage from the Bogota cable:

“In February 2008, [Colombian National Police] sources reported that a Global CST interpreter, Argentine-born Israeli national Shai Killman, had made copies of classified Colombian Defense Ministry documents in an unsuccessful attempt to sell them to the [FARC] through contacts in Ecuador and Argentina. The documents allegedly contained high value target (HVT) database information. Ziv denied this attempt and sent Killman back to Israel”.

http://www.aljazeera.com/AJEPlayer/player-licensed-viral.swf
Colombia’s new scheme to reach reconciliation

Ziv’s denial becomes less compelling in light of the fact that Global CST has lent its services to both the armed forces of the nation of Georgia as well as to Georgia’s breakaway republic of Abkhazia. The firm’s peaceable aims are furthermore called into question by the arms and training it reportedly provided to the Guinean military junta responsible for massacring pro-democracy protesters in Conakry in 2009.

Present on the board of Global CST is former Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh, whose recent efforts on behalf of peace have included defending the mass slaughter of Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead because Hamas had failed to “bring… investors to Gaza”. The former minister did not explain how investors were expected to navigate an Israeli military blockade when smaller items such as pasta and pencils were not permitted passage.

‘The Israelites of Latin America’

The encroachment of Global CST into the imperial realm of the US government was facilitated by Juan Manuel Santos, current president of Colombia, who has explained that the firm was recommended to him during his term as defence minister by his friend, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.

In a promotional video for Global CST, Santos characterises the company as follows: “They are people with a lot of experience; they have been helping us to work better. It’s like the person who is in the gym, and when you go and you do the exercise he tells you how to do it better.”

More effusive praise is offered on behalf of the athletic trainers in a video for an Israeli television programme – in which Santos announces: “We’ve even been accused of being the Israelites [sic] of Latin America, which personally makes me feel really proud.”

This pronouncement occurs shortly after the programme’s narrator has described Colombia’s 2008 raid into Ecuador and assassination of FARC second-in-command Raul Reyes. The narrator’s Hebrew assessment of the operation is transcribed with English subtitles: “All of a sudden, the methods that proved efficient in Nablus and Hebron begin speaking Spanish.”

In addition to a shared pride in illegal extraterritorial targeted killings, there are other reasons Colombia might qualify as the Israel of Latin America. For starters, the late Carlos Castano Gil – father of modern Colombian paramilitarism – acknowledged copying the paramilitary concept from the Israelis during a training excursion to Israel in the 1980s.

In matters requiring the displacement of human beings from land, the Zionist example is undoubtedly invaluable, though the Colombians unfortunately lack the option of citing Biblical endorsement of territorial claims. In both locales, the liberal application of the term “terrorist” provides convenient justification for the elimination of excess sectors of the populace, be they Palestinians in refugee camps or Colombian peasants whose existence infringes on the designs of international corporations vis-a-vis area resources.

That the death and destruction wrought by the Jewish state and the paragon of military-paramilitary collusion that is the state of Colombia quantitatively and qualitatively outweighs that wrought by their respective nemeses has meanwhile not jeopardised their positions as top recipients of US military aid.

Military creativity

The necessity of casting victims in the role of aggressors has resulted in a range of creative military performances in both the original Israel and its Latin American apprentice. In 2008, Colombian soldiers were revealed to have murdered possibly thousands of civilians and then dressed the corpses in FARC attire in order to receive bonus pay and extra holiday time.

Juan Manuel Santos was serving as defence minister under President Alvaro Uribe when the “false positives” scandal broke. Despite this and other details – such as that, since Uribe’s assumption of office, more trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined – Santos managed to comment on the aforementioned Israeli television programme that fear “no longer exists” in Colombia and that “now we feel free”.

As for Israeli military creativity, spokeswoman Avital Leibovitch explained in the aftermath of the 2010 massacre on the Mavi Marmara – part of the Freedom Flotilla endeavouring to break the Gaza siege – that the victims of the incident were not the nine slain Turkish humanitarian activists – but rather the commandos who had shot them.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry dutifully uploaded a Flickr photo set entitled “Weapons found on Mavi Marmara“, which underscored the violent tendencies of the seafarers and consisted of images of water bottles, kitchen knives, screwdrivers, keffiyehs, and a slingshot decorated with pink and purple stars and the word “Hizbollah”. That the slingshot was not actually “found on Mavi Marmara” but rather resurrected from an irrelevant archive is suggested by the label accompanying the image, according to which “This photo was taken on February 7, 2006 using a Nikon D2Xs”.

Colombians were given the opportunity to defend their position as the Israelites of Latin America when, upon completion of Uribe’s presidential term in 2010, he was recycled into the post of Vice-Chairman of the UN panel tasked with investigating the flotilla massacre. The resulting report – which determined that a group of flotilla activists had engaged in an “extreme level of violence”, and which upheld the validity of the Israeli siege of Gaza in spite of the UN’s own classification of the siege as illegal – presumably benefited from Uribe’s professed notion that human rights organisations often serve as fronts for terrorists.

The peace community of San Jose de Apartado

Defending her position as de facto Colombian paramilitary of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, meanwhile, Mary O’Grady reported an alliance between FARC terrorists and “peaceniks” in a 2009 article about the Colombian peace community of San Jose de Apartado, affiliated with various NGOs.

The peace community, which I visited that same year, was founded in 1997 in the Uraba region in northwestern Colombia as a response to decades of armed conflict. Employing a system of collective work groups dedicated to the cultivation of crops ranging from miniature bananas to cacao, the community rejects collaboration with all armed actors: military, paramilitary and FARC guerrillas alike. Nevertheless, as of its twelfth anniversary in 2009, it had suffered 184 assassinations out of a population of approximately 1,500.

Twenty-four assassinations have been attributed to the FARC, while the remainder is attributed to the armed forces and/or paramilitary formations. Such calculations render all the more ludicrous O’Grady’s advertisement of the claim that “the peace community helped the FARC in its effort to tag the Colombian military as a violator of human rights”.

Community co-founder Maria Brigida Gonzalez – whose 15-year-old daughter Elisena was murdered in her sleep in 2005 by members of the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade, which claimed Elisena was a FARC combatant – speculated to me that the ultimate purpose of such attacks was “to sow terror so that we all flee and the land’s resources can be exploited”.

Colombia as regional security model

In a WikiLeaks cable from March 2009, the US embassy in Bogota specified that the region of Uraba was one of “17 strategic focus areas” within one of “two key swathes of territory” in Colombia where Global CST was assisting the Uribe government in “achiev[ing] irreversibility” in the battle against the FARC. Nine months later, the same embassy sounded the alarm that the firm had infringed on US territory.

It is doubtful, of course, that the Israelis will usurp the US legacy in Colombia, one ironic manifestation of which was contained in the email update I received last year from the peace community listing recent instances of harassment and killing of area residents: “John Kennedy was assassinated the afternoon of Wednesday, May 11 when he left his house to meet some neighbours for a game of soccer.”

Whether or not Colombians start naming their offspring David Ben-Gurion, the fact that the country has been applauded by the US State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank as a regional role model in confronting security threats ensures the fortification of a system in which profits depend on the perpetuation of insecurity.

Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in Nov. 2011. She is an editor at PULSE Media, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Guernica Magazine, and many other publications.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

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January 7, 2012 1

The Meedan Bombings in Damascus

Friday, January 06, 2012

Maysaloon : If people were more cautious about laying the blame last time, there seems to be no hesitation in blaming the regime for this morning’s bomb blast in Damascus. Syrian television, with grisly voyeurism, appears to be relishing showing the blood and death that are the by-products of such bombings.

Why are these bombings happening on a Friday? Why have they only started happening now that the Arab League observers are in Syria? So many questions and too few answers. I think the finger of blame can also go the other way, and whilst the regime could plausibly be behind the attacks, we cannot rule out rogue elements in the opposition. The fact that only hours beforehand, Colonel Riad al Asaad had warned of further attacks against the regime, has only stoked the fires of propaganda against the Free Syrian Army. Yet the fact remains, why would a suicide bomber carry out such attacks with such timing and limited success, when there are enormous pro-regime demonstrations that are held in the Ummayad square or in Aleppo? In fact, why is it only the anti-regime demonstrations that get shot at if the regime’s story of armed groups is true? Wouldn’t an armed group attack pro-regime demonstrations? Shouldn’t common sense tell us that a more sensational target would be the pro-regime demonstrators? Or perhaps carrying out the bombings on a day that would not distract from the anti-regime protests that happen each Friday? Finally, al Qaeda or any of these terrorist groups usually relish the opportunity to declare their responsibility, so why has nobody stepped forward yet?

Questions, questions, questions…

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January 7, 2012 0

Israeli students to get $2,000 to spread state propaganda on Facebook

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 01/04/2012 – 17:53>

The National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS) has become a full-time partner in the Israeli government’s efforts to spread its propaganda online and on college campuses around the world.

NUIS has launched a program to pay Israeli university students $2,000 to spread pro-Israel propaganda online for 5 hours per week from the “comfort of home.”

The union is also partnering with Israel’s Jewish Agency to send Israeli students as missionaries to spread propaganda in other countries, for which they will also receive a stipend.

This active recruitment of Israeli students is part of Israel’s orchestrated effort to suppress the Palestinian solidarity movement under the guise of combating “delegitimization” of Israel and anti-Semitism.

The involvement of the official Israeli student union as well as Haifa University, Tel Aviv University, Ben-Gurion University and Sapir College in these state propaganda programs will likely bolster Palestinian calls for the international boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Suite

January 4, 2012 0

Hamas and the Brotherhood: Reanimating history

RAMZY BAROUD

There was an unmistakable hint of triumph in the comments made by Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the elected Hamas government in Gaza when he was hosted by Mohammed Badie, chairman of the Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Both leaders said what would be expected of them under these circumstances. Haniyeh asserted that his movement’s “presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity,” and Badie reaffirmed the Brotherhood’s commitment to “issues of liberation, foremost the Palestinian issue.”

It is very telling that Haniyeh’s first official visit outside Gaza as prime minister was to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo’s Moqattam district. He shared his message — of resistance against Israeli occupation, national unity with rival Fatah and reaching out to Muslim countries — and then resumed his regional tour.

Since 2006, Hamas has attempted, but largely failed to win the approval of governments in Muslim-majority countries. Muslim solidarity was the thrust of Hamas’ foreign policy aimed at lessening Palestinian political and financial dependence on the US and other Western governments. It failed because, as it turned out, US financial and political leverage is too overpowering and far-reaching for a relatively small movement like Hamas to single handedly challenge. But, as Haniyeh himself reiterated, times are changing

In the first and second rounds of Egyptian elections, the Brotherhood’s newly created Freedom and Justice party won more than 35 percent of the vote. The electoral success was hardly an anomaly. The Islamic Nahda party, which formed the first post-revolutionary government in Tunisia, won more than 40 percent of the vote last October. Morocco’s Justice and Development party won the November elections and the Islamic leaning of Libya’s new political set up is all too palpable. There have been marks of Islamic political influence in other countries across the region.

The reformation of the political landscape in the Arab region has tempted many to infer polarizing, if not frightening conclusions. Israeli Army Home Front Command Chief Maj. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg was one of the first in Israel to refer to these developments as an Arab Spring turning into a “radical Islamic winter”. He said, “This leads us to the conclusion that through a long-term process, the likelihood of an all-out war is increasingly growing.”

However, what truly worries Israel is not the radicalization of Muslim societies, but the rise of Islamic politics to represent a rational, mainstream political discourse. It threatens Israel because it rallies many Arabs around one cohesive political agenda, and repositions Palestine, once more, as central to what many Muslim intellectuals refer to as the “Islamic Awakening.”

Israeli fear mongering aside, the US — Israel’s main benefactor — must find ways to co-exist with the new political arrangement. Other Western governments too “will have to adapt to a power shift they have long sought to prevent,” wrote Roula Khalaf and Heba Saleh in the Financial Times (Dec. 28).

For Israel, however, the transformation in regional politics will prove unbearable. It is not Tunisia’s Nahda party that Israel is most concerned about, of course; it is Hamas. This is partly what compelled Haniyeh to venture out of Gaza. As the US is hoping to control, if not manage, the rise of Islamic parties, Hamas aims at ensuring a primary position for Palestine — as seen through the prism of the Islamic movement — in the region’s new political landscape.

There is little doubt that Hamas’ rise to political prominence in 2006, and the numerous subsequent attempts at isolating and destroying it will influence new Islamic parties in various Arab countries. Hamas’ ability to survive has certainly registered among new Muslim politicians in Egypt and elsewhere. Now, with the early fruits of the Egyptian revolution being plucked by Islamic parties, Hamas is guardedly making its move. Hamas is a “jihadi movement of the Brotherhood with a Palestinian face,” said Haniyeh in Cairo.

A quick look at the roots of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine shows that Haniyeh was hardly exaggerating. Since the Society of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Ismailiyya, Egypt, in 1928 by Hasan Al-Banna and a few others, it quickly found in Palestine a rally cry to unite Muslims through the entire region. The first link between the movement and Palestine was formed in 1935, when Abd Al-Rahman Al-Banna (the founder’s brother) visited Palestine and met with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini.

The Brotherhood became visible during the revolt of 1936, as they communicated the Palestinian message with an Islamic tone to the rest of the Arab world. The cause of Palestine promptly became the central mission and calling of the Brotherhood, as Hasan Al-Banna himself headed the newly founded General Central Committee to Aid Palestine.

More, in April 1948, when most Arab governments delayed in partaking in the defense of Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood deployed three battalions of volunteers.

Estimates of the number of Brotherhood volunteers in Palestine during the war and the subsequent Nakba vary, but Hasan Al-Banna himself noted, in March 1948, that the movement had approximately 1,500 volunteers in Palestine.

The relationship between the Brotherhood and Palestine had it ebbs and flows, but the rapport was never completely severed. Even before Hamas was officially established 1987, the movement functioned under various classifications, all directly affiliated with Egypt’s Brotherhood.

The recent Cairo meeting between Haniyeh and Badie could be understood within that historical context, representing a triumphant reunion and possibly open coordination. This would once again rejuvenate the Brotherhood’s Palestine connection, and grant Hamas greater political leverage — after years of isolation, and despite the current political turmoil in the region.

Of course, Hamas’ challenges are many and growing. Leading among them is Israel’s violent escalation in Gaza, and the unremitting US pressure. Still, it is expected that Hamas’ political message and outlook will continue to find balance between Palestinian exceptionality and the more inclusive Arab and Islamic framework.

By venturing out of Gaza, Haniyeh is hoping to expand the diameters of the Palestinian Islamic movement into Egypt and beyond — thus reclaiming what Hamas once considered “the strategic depth” of the Palestinian cause. While such a push failed to attain its objectives in 2006, 2012 is a brand new year.

— Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

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January 4, 2012 0

Checkmate كش مات

[youtube http://youtu.be/EDqjQxxHmPs?]

January 3, 2012 0

Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away

by Philip Weiss on January 1, 2012 38

Hannah Arendt

For the new year, here are some prophetic excerpts from two essays of Hannah Arendt’s, collected in The Jewish Writings (2007). Please note her predictions of the Nakba, of unending conflict, of Zionist dependence on the American Jewish community, of ultimate conflict with that American Jewish community, and the contribution of political Zionism to world anti-semitism. Just what Howard Gutman said recently. For which he was denounced by– Zionists.

Zionism Reconsidered, 1944:

Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse. This is the threatened state of Jewish nationalism and of the proposed Jewish state, surrounded inevitably by Arab states and Arab people. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine–nay even a transfer of all Palestine’s Arabs, which is openly demanded by the revisionists–would not substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask protection from an outside power against their neighbors or come to a working agreement with their neighbors…

[T]he Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean people and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences…

[T]he sole new piece of historical philosophy which the Zionists contributed out of their own new experiences [was] “A nation is a group of people… held together by a common enemy” (Herzl)–an absurd doctrine…

To such [political] independence, it was believed, the Jewish nation could arrive under the protecting wings of any great power strong enough to shelter its growth…. the Zionists ended by making the Jewish national emancipation entirely dependent upon the material intersts of another nation.

The actual result was a return of the new movement to the traditional methods of shtadlonus [court Jews], which the Zionists once had so bitterly despised and violently denounced. Now Zionists too knew no better place politically than the lobbies of the powerful, and no sounder basis for agreements than their good services as agents of foreign interests…

[O]nly folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbors. What then, one is prompted to ask, will be the future policy of Zionism with respect to big powers, and what program will Zionists have to offer for a solution of the Arab-Jewish conflict?…

If a Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future–with or without partition–it will be due to the political influence of American Jews…. But if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country [the U.S.], who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East. It may eventually be far more of a responsibility than today they imagine or tomorrow can make good.

To Save the Jewish Homeland, 1948 [on the occasion of war in Palestine]

And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded into ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and acitvities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy…. And all this would be the fate of a nation that — no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)–would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.

Under such circumstances… the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland…

One grim addendum. In the heyday of the special relationship between the US and Israel, American Jewry felt itself to be one with the Israeli people. We Are One! declared Melvin Urofsky’s book of 1978. That unity is today being dissolved. The haredi-secular conflict in Israel that is getting so much attention here is one means of that dissolution. And the aim, unconsciously, may be a desire by American Jews to distance themselves from Israeli Jews so that when the Arab Spring at last brings a democratic movement to Israel and Palestine, and bloody conflict ensues, and the Israeli gov’t is cast as the bad guys, American Jews are emotionally prepared to regard the bloodshed as inevitable and not their problem.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.

View all posts by Philip Weiss →

January 2, 2012 0

The Commotion wireless project.

As recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have illustrated (and Myanmar demonstrated several years prior), democratic activists around the globe need a secure and reliable platform to ensure their communications cannot be controlled or cut off by authoritarian regimes. To date, technologies meant to circumvent blocked communications have focused predominantly on developing services that run over preexisting communication infrastructures. Although these applications are important, they still require the use of a wireline or wireless network that is prone to monitoring or can be completely shut down by central authorities. Moreover, many of these technologies do not interface well with each other, limiting the ability of activists and the general public to adopt sophisticated circumvention technologies.

With support from New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative (OTI), Chambana.net, and Acorn Active Media the developers, technavists, and organizers here propose to build a new type of tool for democratic organizing: an open source “device-as-infrastructure” distributed communications platform that integrates users’ existing cell phones, WiFi-enabled computers, and other WiFi-capable personal devices to create a metro-scale peer-to-peer (mesh) communications network. Leveraging a distributed, mesh wireless infrastructure provides two key enhancements to existing circumvention technologies and supports human rights advocates and civil society organizations working around the globe. First, a distributed infrastructure eliminates the ability of governments to completely disrupt communications by shutting down the commercial or state-owned communications infrastructure. Second, device-as- infrastructure networks enhance communications security among activists by eliminating points for centralized monitoring, by enabling direct peer-to-peer communication, and by aggregating and securing individual communications streams.

For over a decade, developers here have pioneered the development of “device-as-infrastructure” broadband networks. By utilizing cell phones and best-of-breed open source projects from around the globe, OTI’s implementation strategy integrates already existing hardware (and extensions to currently available open source initiatives) to dramatically increase the security and robustness of telecommunications. Specifically, this project proposes the following five-point solution:

Create a robust and reliable participatory communications medium that is not reliant upon centralized infrastructure for local-to-local (peer-to-peer) and local-to-Internet communications;
Design ad hoc device-as-infrastructure technologies that can survive major outages (e.g. electricity, Internet connectivity) and are resilient during emergencies, natural disasters, or other hostile environments where conventional telecommunications networks are easily crippled;
Secure participants’ communication to protect data integrity and anonymity through strong end-to-end encryption and data aggregation;
Implement communications technologies that integrate low-cost, pre-existing, off-the-shelf devices (e.g. cell phones, laptops, consumer WiFi routers) and maximize use of open source software; and,
Develop an open, modular, and highly extensible communications platform that is easily upgraded and adapted to the particular needs and goals of different local users.

We need developers, organizers, technical writers, and folks to help with outreach. More Arabic speakers are also needed. Concerns are raising to support this project as we suspect other Middle-Eastern countries may soon respond to ongoing protests in the same way. If you would like to help, please sign up on the mailing lists listed below or sign into the IRC chat below.

On the open source mesh side, folks have begun to organize around two focuses. First is to upgrade the olsr client ports (http://www.olsr.org/?q=download) starting with Windows, OS X, iPhone, and Android. This will allow folks on the ground to create a community intranet from existing user devices. Second is to move forward with an OpenWRT (http://www.openwrt.org/) based firmware called commotion. This will allow existing on the ground routers to be flashed with a open source meshing system as well as create live CDs to best make use of equipment already in possession of residents or available over the counter.

Both initial focuses of the project are being managed openly at http://tech.chambana.net/projects/commotion and http://tech.chambana.net/projects/OLSRd. You can create an account there to contribute to the development of this code. You can also pull the code anonymously via:

$ git clone git://git.chambana.net/commotion/commotion-openwrt.git

Our first hope is first create an intranet as requested from our growing contacts on the ground to facilitate the creation of local based organizing and outreach intranet applications. Concurrently, we are working to provide strategic uplinks via satellite and dial-up to get folks reconnected to the global internet. Finally, we hope to integrate the good work folks at Tor are doing (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/Torouter) into a bundle and the firmware as well. More ideas are of course welcome!

Below is a list of mailing lists for the intranet development:

Developers List
http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-dev

General Discussion List
http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-discuss

Announcement Only List
http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-announce

Folks are also communicating via IRC in #oswc on irc.freenode.net (or http://webchat.freenode.net/ for a web client).

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions are available in our Documents section.

All code for the Commotion project is under the GNU GPL Version 3, unless otherwise stated.